Erik NISSEN JOHANSEN

Multiple award-winner of the most important international design competitions of the past year and nominated at Best Restaurant, Best Bar and Best Café categories at the 2014 edition of the world's only event dedicated exclusively to the design of food and drink spaces.

Stylt Trampoli is a multi-award-winning Swedish concept- and design agency with clients and projects all over the world. Their architects, art directors, designers, marketers and branding experts use storytelling to build projects where the brand, the business opportunity and the interiors are perfectly aligned, creating inspiring environments and memorable experiences for guests. Most of their clients are hotels and restaurants, with occasional forays into themed attractions, resorts, and destination development.

Stylt have been around for over 20 years, and yet they are still unique at what they do. Their core competence is to stage a story using customer-centered and experience-based communication, and their knowledge builds on the insights of the modern human condition, human desires and behaviors and also on an understanding of trends and tendencies. Based on this, cross-border solutions can be created by architects, interior designers, artists and communicators.

Stylt has its merits primarily in the experience, destination and hospitality industry and has succeeded in creating a number of very commercially viable concepts. They have, nationally and internationally, been involved in more than 400 restaurants, 250 hotels and a variety of destinations during their time in the business. With experience from the experience industry Stylt have developed effective methods to visualize intrinsic commercial capital in the form of appreciated business ideas with conceptual stories that deserve to be told.

Five recent Stylt projects have been shortlisted in the The Restaurant and Bar Design Awards 2014, the world’s only event dedicated exclusively to the design of food and drink spaces and the International Hotel & Property Awards 2014, celebrating the highest levels of achievement by companies operating in all sectors of the property and real estate industry. Pharmarium in Stockholm is shortlisted for Best Bar in both competitions, while Cuckoo’s Nest, Le Pain Francais sur L’Avenue and Aaltos Italian Grill & Garden are all up for for Best Restaurant, with Le Pain Francais also nominated in the Best Café category. Stora Hotellet Umeå is nominated in three different categories: Best Hotel 50-200 Rooms, Best Lobby/Lounge/Public Area, and Best Hotel Design (Europe).

In GIS Warsaw, Erik Nissen Johansen will speak about The Power of Storytelling in Hospitality: “My mission is to show the world the power of storytelling. My talk will reveal how my colleagues and I go about creating successful hotels and restaurants, using a simple, but unique, formula: just tell a story worth retelling. Contemporary hospitality consumers are looking for meaningful experiences. That’s why we focus on vivid story lines that trigger genuine emotional responses, using a process that we have been developing for over 20 years now. It is always exciting to talk in front of a new audience, in a new city, and I am really looking forward to discovering Warsaw!” said Erik.

Le Pain Français is a successful chain of French-inspired cafés in Gothenburg, a city well-known for its vibrant café culture. For this high-profile location on Gothenburg’s most prominent boulevard, the owners wanted to create a bistro, i.e., to serve dinner as well as lunches and have a full bar. The bistro concept was a big step for the owners, and the design needed to be as ambitious as the vision. The location, with some of the toughest restaurant competition in the city, also called for something out of the ordinary.

The inspiration for Le Pain Français Avenyn comes from the city of Paris during La Belle Époque, a time when technology was our friend, and engineers like Eiffel and authors like Jules Verne helped people envision the exciting possibilities of the new age.

Le Pain Français Avenyn has four floors (whereof the top one is made of glass) and a glass elevator. The different sections of the restaurants all have names – the entrance is the Porte de Paris, and the middle section, under the great clock and the hot air balloon basket (which contains a DJ station), is the Place de Trocadero. Beyond that lies the Boudoir, a cozy nook made for intimate dining. In the basement, one can watch the chefs and smell the baking bread in the Patisserie section, while eatting the petit déjeuner and peruse one of the many cookbooks on the shelves.

On the second floor, one can find the Salon Royal, a relaxed but elegant area centred on two fireplaces and also filled with books, from glossy works on art, film, photography to all the great French writers. One floor up, one can explore the Chambre des Curiosités and its row of gothic cabinets filled with a stunning variety of antique French flea-market finds – everything from ladies’ boots to stuffed birds and old books. The fireplace is surrounded by a hand-carved wooden mantelpiece. Finally, on the top floor, the Jardin Secret is a glazed-in roof terrace with lemon and grape trees, lit by lamps made by the same factory that makes those on the streets of Paris.

On opening, the new bistro attracted exceptional amounts of attention, and media around the world as well as in Gothenburg have been fascinated with its imaginative luxury. Le Pain Francais is nominated at Best Restaurant and Best Café categories at The Restaurant and Bar Design Awards 2014.

Einstein went sailing in dead calms. Da Vinci’s was so paranoid that he kept all his notes in mirror-writing – upside down. Nikolai Tesla liked to electrocute himself in public, and Richard Feynman picked locks in his spare time. You don’t have to be mad to be a scientist, but it sure seems to help!

This was the insight that inspired The Cuckoo’s nest, a restaurant, bar and all-day, all-night social hub located in the arcane borderlands between genius and madness. It is also, somehow, located on Lindholmen, an innovation park, technology hub, and IT campus all rolled into one, can be a chilly place in winter. It’s the first stopping place for icy winds blasting in off the North Atlantic, and the gleaming glass-and-steel buildings don’t offer much shelter. Almost 20,000 students, teachers, and workers spend their days here.

“It wasn’t just that the hotel needed a restaurant,” says Stylt Trampoli creative director and founder Erik Nissen Johansen. “It was that the people of Lindholmen, the thinkers, innovators, coders, contrarians and creatives (and their friends), needed a meeting place – somewhere warm and home-like where they could brainstorm, write, mingle, drink, laugh, eat and hatch new ideas.”

Visually, it is a happy clash between an old-fashioned library and the most comfortable natural history museum ever, and there are more than a few whimsical touches – such as the mysterious collection of scrap paper surrounding the tv-screen, the chalked Einsteinian notes on the bar and the small banner-toting biplane suspended from the ceiling.

“Creative people have a very serious need for whimsy,” explains Erik. “Playing is the best way to have an idea, and this place is all about new ideas. And old! We wanted to help tell the story of this place, of industry and innovation and technology, and the people who made it all happen.”

Cuckoo’s Nest won the Bar category at the 2013 European Hotel Design Awards.